Foucault's pendulum - Umberto Eco [271]
It was about eleven. I crossed the Lavoisier hall without turning on the flashlight, remembering the hallucinations of that afternoon. I crossed the corridor with the model trains.
There were already people in the nave: dim lights moving, the sound of shuffling, of objects being dragged.
Would I have time to make it to the sentry box? I slipped along the cases with the model trains and was soon close to the statue of Gramme, in the transept. On a wooden pedestal, cubic in form (the cubic stone of Yesod!), it stood as if to guard the entrance to the choir. My Statue of Liberty was almost directly behind it.
The front panel of the pedestal had been lowered, a kind of gangplank allowing people to enter the nave from some concealed passage. In fact, an individual emerged from there with a lantern—a gas lantern, with colored glass, which illuminated his face in red patches. I pressed myself into a corner, and he didn’t see me. A second man joined him from the choir. “Vite,” he said. “Hurry. In an hour they’ll be here.”
So this was the vanguard, preparing something for the rite. If there weren’t too many of them, I could still reach Liberty before They arrived—God knows from where, and in what numbers—by the same route. For a long while I crouched low, following the glints of the lanterns in the church, the regular alternation of the lights between greater and lesser intensity. I calculated how far they moved away from Liberty and how much of it remained in shadow. Then, at a certain moment, I risked it, squeezed past the leftside of Gramme, atightfit, painful, even sucking in my stomach. Luckily, I was thin as a rail. Lia...I made a dash, slipped into the sentry box, where I sank to the floor and curled up in a fetal position. My heart raced; my teeth chattered.
I had to relax. I breathed through my nose rhythmically, my breaths gradually deeper and deeper. This is how, under torture, you can make yourself lose consciousness and escape the pain. And, in fact, I sank slowly into the embrace of the Subterranean World.
113
Our cause is a secret within a secret, a secret that only another secret can explain; it is a secret about a secret that is veiled by a secret.
—Ja ‘far as-Sadiq, sixth Imam
Slowly, I regained consciousness, heard sounds; the light, now stronger, made me blink. My feet were numb. When I tried to get up, making no noise, I felt I was standing on a bed of spiny sea urchins. The Little Mermaid. Silently I stood on tiptoe, then bent my knees, and the pain lessened. Peering out cautiously, left and right, I saw that the sentry box was still pretty much in the shadows. Only then did I take in the scene.
The nave was illuminated on all sides. There were now dozens and dozens of lanterns, carried by new arrivals, who were entering from the passage behind me. They moved by on my left, into the choir, or lined up in the nave. My God, I said to myself, a Night on Bald Mountain, Walt Disney version.
They didn’t raise their voices; they whispered, together creating a noise like a crowd scene in a play: rhubarb rhubarb.
To the left, the lanterns were set on the floor in a semicircle, completing, with a flattened arc, the eastern curve of the choir, and touching, at the southernmost point, the statue of Pascal. A burning brazier had been placed there, and on it someone was throwing herbs, essences. The smoke reached me in the box, parched my throat, gave me a feeling of dazed excitement.
In the center of the choir, in the flickering of the lanterns, something stirred, a slender shadow.
The Pendulum! The Pendulum no longer swayed in its familiar place in the center of the transept. A larger version of it had been hung from the keystone in the center of the choir. The sphere was larger; the wire much thicker, like a hawser, I thought, or a cable of braided metal strands. The Pendulum, now enormous, must have appeared this way in the Pantheon. It was like beholding the moon through a telescope.
They had re-created the pendulum that the Templars first experimented with, half